1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of computing moments in RLC interconnects of high-speed VLSI circuits and, more particularly, to a method of moment computations of lumped interconnect circuits with resistor loops.
2. Description of Related Art
With the advance of modem VLSI techniques, delay and signal/power integrity issues on interconnects have played a significant role on performances of an IC design. To address these issues effectively, interconnects are often modeled as lumped or distributed R(L)C circuits. Owing to the increasing wire density and the required modeling accuracy, the wire model for practical chip designs may be with a huge scale. Thus, using traditional circuit simulators, such as SPICE, to simulate such circuits become inefficient and impractical.
In order to solve this task, moment matching methods have been widely applied in the past for timing analysis, crosstalk estimations, power/ground network analysis, and generating reduced-order models of VLSI interconnect models. For example, see U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,047,117; 6,308,304; 6,314,546; 6,347,393; 6,601,223; and 6,662,149. Since interconnects are often modeled as R(L)C trees, the moments at nodes on the frees can be calculated recursively in an efficient manner (L. T. Pillage and R. A. Rohrer, “Asymptotic waveform evaluation for timing analysis,” IEEE Trans. on CAD, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 352-366, 1990; C. L. Ratzlaff and L. T. Pillage, “RICE: Rapid interconnect circuit evaluation using AWE,” IEEE Trans. on CAD, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 763-776, 1994; Q. Yu, and E. S. Kuh, “Exact moment matching models of transmission lines and application to interconnect delay estimation,” IEEE Trans. on VLSI Systems, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 311-322, 1995; Q. Yu, and E. S. Kuh, “Moment computation of lumped and distributed coupled RC frees with application to delay and crosstalk Estimation,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 89, No. 5, pp. 772-788, 2001; and Q. Yu, E. S. Kuh and T. Xue, “Moment models of general transmission lines with application to interconnect analysis and optimization,” IEEE Trans. on VLSI Systems, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 477-494, 1996. However, if interconnect structures contain resistor loops (links), which have been widely considered in power/ground or clock networks, or dielectric losses, these moment computation formulas need to be modified due to do currents flowing through these links.
In recent work, Chan et al. proposed a technique to compute the Elmore delay called the first-order moment) in general RC networks •P. K. Chan and K. Karplus, “Computing signal delay in general RC networks by tree/link partition,” IEEE Trans. on CAD, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 898-902, 1990•. Ratzlaff et al. extended the branch tearing for computing moments of the interconnect circuits with resistor loops •C. L. Ratzlaff and L. T. Pillage, “RICE: Rapid interconnect circuit evaluation using AWE,” IEEE Trans. on CAD, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 763-776, 1994•. The basic idea of the above two approaches is using the concept of Kron's method. The interconnect network can be partitioned into a spanning tree and several key links. As a result, delays at nodes of a given tree can be obtained by sequentially appending these links back to reconstruct the original network •R. A. Rohrer, “Circuit partitioning simplified,” IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 2-5, 1988•. The key techniques of tree/link partitions are the substitution theorem and the superposition theorem. If the circuit network contains only one resistor link, the computational cost is low. Nevertheless, for multiple resistor links, the problem becomes more complicated since the currents flowing through unopened resistor links are required to be known in advance. Ratzlaff et al. demonstrated that the computational costs are rather high with a large number of links.